Solitude
by AGENT Kuma-chan
Summary: Sometimes it's hard to tell reality and illusion apart. It's even harder to tell if she wants to.--Chrome, Mukuro, Chikusa, Ken.


**Title:** Solitude

**Characters:** Chrome, mentions of Tsuna, Chikusa, Ken, and Mokuro

**Prompt:** September // by disillusions glow

**A/N**: This is based off a smaller one-shot I wrote with a similar idea. I more or less expanded it.

**Summary:** _There is a reason that reality and fantasy do not mix._

…

…

…

…

She glances at the agitated beast, roaring as he burned the food again, and at the silent keeper, fiddling away at his toys. Over the din she can hear his voice in her head, his occasional word as essential as her heartbeat.

It's comfortable here, in a rough and untamed way. Sometimes she dreams away the past and thinks that this is all that exists—a boy-beast, a silent inventor, a half-dead girl, and a voice that they all are waiting to return.

Then reality catches up and no illusion can fix it.

-x-

It's the first thing that Chrome notices when she finds herself in the empty room, the dust of abandonment clinging where she just saw Ken sleeping.

Silence.

There is the softest of sounds, the wind blowing through the building's cracks and holes, trying to wear it out piece by piece. At times it whistles, at others it howls, but mostly it just whispers in and out of rooms, slowly but steadily bringing change.

Like a ticking clock, she takes a step forward into a time she cannot (does not want to) understand. She almosts hesitates before calling out their names—they would never leave this place so quiet—but then panic hits her and she starts to yell.

The second thing she notices, the one that scares her the most, is that she can't hear Mukuro-sama's voice anymore.

-x-

"You're in the future," Tsuna tells her and she can believe it.

Even if she doesn't know how, she can look at him and see that he is not the same boy she saw a short while ago. He looks a little older, a little more worn out, as though all the secrets (the lies and truths, the truths and lies) he has been carrying grew too large and difficult to hold on to. A dam threatening to burst, she can see how he tries to hold it in.

It's not working, not with people who shouldn't be here but are. Those two girls are starting to see the little seeps where water spills out and it's only a matter of time before they try to catch it all.

Chrome hesitates before she asks her next question, the one that she hears with every breath she takes. "Do you know where _he_ is?"

"…" Tsuna pauses, looking down before he continues. He looks even more tired—this new world, with its hope diseased and riddled with death, doesn't suit him at all. "Not yet."

"Oh." It's almost a relief, she thinks, because at the very least she knows he is alive.

Her very life tells that.

-x-

It's not quite love. Or maybe it is, a mix of romance and family and friendship that blends into a colourful confused picture. At the very least, she knows it can not be defined by just one word, even though Haru wants to.

"But the way you reacted to him, didn't you love him, in that way?" Haru tries to explain herself further.

Chrome pauses, thinking. "I…I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

Easily, she thinks, ignoring Haru's exasperated sigh. Feelings don't always fit into boxes, their edges neatly cut off. They join each other, the corners mixing together like paint on a palette. Sometimes her heat beats faster at just the thought of Mukuro, her world frozen when she finally catches the sigh to of him. Then again, her fingers drum the tune of the two she hasn't seen yet, the two that were left behind.

She loves them all, her imperfect family. Each flaw wraps them around her heart tighter and tighter. Perhaps she puts Mukuro at a higher place than the others, but he is the one that saved her, he is the one that found her.

It's not as cut and dry as Haru makes it. They all tied themselves to her, intentional or not, and there is no choosing one over the other.

Chrome smiles to herself. "I just love them." It is that simple.

-x-

Chrome can't sleep at night. She misses them, misses them like a stray wolf misses its pack. Sometimes she hears a loud step or an irritated growl—in her dreams or is it reality—and looks around for an expected shock of hair. There are no whirring toys, swimming in the darkness, waiting to hit.

That hurts the most, she thinks. The idea that she can't find them when she looks for them.

All she finds are their ghosts instead, the soft traces of memory that wrap her in a cocoon of forgetfulness. Pieces of them stick to it, making her loss larger and smaller each time, and she spends each morning trapped between twilight and dawn.

If she gets stuck in her own illusions at times, mistaking Gokudera for Ken or Basil for Chikusa, the others learn to ignore it and wait for it to pass.

It's not like they are any different.

…

…

…

…


End file.
